


Consign to Oblivion

by ecrivant



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, F/M, Heartache, M/M, Marley Arc (Shingeki no Kyojin), Melancholy, Mental Anguish, Other, Pensive!, Reader-Insert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:34:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28187742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecrivant/pseuds/ecrivant
Summary: Home in Liberio.  Reiner lies awake in rumination, haunted by something you once shared with him.  Takes place during the Marley arc.
Relationships: Reiner Braun/Reader, Reiner Braun/You
Comments: 9
Kudos: 104





	Consign to Oblivion

**Author's Note:**

> an unofficial prelude to tendresse (which you can read here if you want spiritual closure to this piece: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28064259). god, this son of a bitch reiner is one sad bastard.

There was a fissure in the ceiling above him—a spanning interstice through which a seam of light from the room above penetrated the opaque darkness below. He stared at it nightly. Watching as it stretched across the room, a fracture worsened by an incessant stress. Looking at it made him sad, deeply so, though he could not say why. Only cognizant that it was a sorrow that hollowed out his bones and burrowed in the vacancies. He was uneased by the muffled atmosphere of the room; the comfort of his bed; the sound of rain outside; the aching, cavernous feeling in his person. He could not sleep, and having conceded to this sleeplessness hours ago, he allowed his mind to drift.

To the last time he saw you. You stood over him, a large, backlit umbra, obscuring his view. Shiganshina burned around you. While Jean reasoned with Hange to spare his life, you stayed silent. Your gaze had been monstrous, vitriolic. His perfidy changed you. He deserved anything and all he received. 

He yearned for a kinder memory, but those seemed so distant, so far removed that they were no longer his. An ownership unwillingly rescinded.

To the first time he met you. Surrounded by innocuous introductions shared between cadets. Neither of you approached the other, only eventually speaking through process of elimination. He presented himself first, hand outstretched, voice strong and commanding. An attempt to contrive his persona. You took his hand with a softness he would come to know, to crave, and simply stated his name back to him. It laid him prostrate before you. His name on your lips was a word to be venerated, some holy relic made solely to languish after. He was made so dumb and blind that he had to ask you to repeat your name. 

Your gentle dictum never left his mind, and he never grew tired of it. Spoken during training, meals, quiet moments, shared. You breathed his name, and he inhaled it. Drunk and high on your eponymous utterance. 

His mind drifted, again, settling in a memory he had many times bypassed in his ruminative dazes. 

The day, grey, sunlight mantled by clouds and thick mist. The Survey Corps headquarters were silent, unnaturally vacant, as he sat alone, as if some cosmic entity granted him a moment of intimate respite. Privacy and solitude were concepts long foregone since he stepped onto Paradisian land, himself always haunted by Bertoldt or Annie or a fellow cadet, or a nagging and burgeoning sense of self-reproach that seemed more and more permeative the longer he was away from home. Abortive in his mission yet so unduly devoted—plagued by the guilt of bipartite transgressions. _Had Marco deserved death any more than Marcel?_ His head throbbed, schismatic. He missed his home, his mother; he yearned for their caressive auras. He wished the weight of his berth on Porco, realizing in the same breath that if Porco was in his position, he would not have to shoulder the same burden, as its sole causative factor would be home, safe, angry, in Libero. 

He looked out towards the square and watched as a gust lifted dark silt from the ground, creating a formless cloud of dust that silently floated above the earth, languid, carried by the wind like an enervated companion. He suddenly wondered why he was born. Engendered by some sadistic almighty and loosed from the womb only to miscarry his own purpose. He eluded the thought by turning his attention to the sky above, a billowing nimbus, a swirling, primeval amalgam contained within some celestial tureen, but he could not evade his morbid intellection completely. What had become of his resolve? What would Bertoldt and Annie think? What would Marcel?

“You okay?”

Your voice resounded through him, vibrating his form like a struck bell. Tearing him from his thoughts—a welcome reprieve. He nodded. You took your place beside him. He thought of the first time you met—he wanted you to say his name.

“Reiner?” As if you had heard his silent wish. He turned his head, expectant.

“Why did you join the Survey Corps?”

He was taken aback, sure the two of you had discussed each other’s rationality many times over. He let out a contemplative sound to acknowledge your question.

“To save humanity. For my family. My home.” His accustomed answer. One of which he himself needed convincing but had to tell, for the desire to be a hero was wholly unheroic—he thought bitterly on the irony. 

Silent for a moment too long, he asked you the same. 

“I want to see to humanity’s liberation.” 

Your sincerity was smarting on his skin. To be in the presence of one truly selfless, it made him uneasy. He smiled, obfuscating his discontent, and nodded his head, wordlessly voicing approval. 

Neither spoke after this, opting instead to watch the rolling sky. He hoped for rain, and the sound of distant thunder seemed to answer him. The upcoming expedition would take him outside the walls—one of the first times since Maria, he realized. He thought of Marcel and wanted to disintegrate. 

“I don’t want to be forgotten, actually.” You voice, a sudden, quiet orison, spoken to no one. He silently waited for you to continue, recognizing the beginning of confession. 

“I’m not brave or selfless. I do this with the hope someone will remember me after I die. Maybe it’ll be future generations studying the heroes of the Survey Corps. Or maybe just the people I’ve loved, or the ones I’ve saved. I don’t know. For my own name and soul to die along with my body—that’s my greatest fear.”

You breathed deeply, shoulders dropping. 

“I’m sorry. I’m not sure why I told you that.”

Turning to face him.

“Please don’t think less of me.” 

Reiner desperately wanted to tell you. Tell you he was nothing but a scared child, one who destroyed lives in a desperate pursuit of heroism. Driven by selfishness, blindsided by pride. 

Instead, he comforted you—grabbed your hand and caressed it in silence. You were surprised when he cried.

He had felt so close to you. 

They were presently planning to return to Paradis. Reiner had fully endorsed it, vengeful. Driven by a yearning. _For Eldian posterity,_ he told himself, never having given up the practice of convincing himself of things he did not believe. In the pitch solitude of his room, he reluctantly acknowledged that he was driven by some masochistic desire to see you again. To repent for his transgressions and lay, prostrate, at the feet of his lover, begging for forgiveness—he could not think of a better path to self-vindication. 

Your fear of being forgotten—so human and base and true. He thought to be forever loathed by you was preferable to that terrifying alternative. He would rather be an ever-present scar, a painful remembrance, than a hazy moment of adversity cataracted by your mind’s eye. _What a selfish thought._ Given the choice, he would never desire to be an agent of your anguish, but it was a duty by his own hand bequeathed to him from the moment he was a child. A chain of events propagated by naïve ambition. Now cursed to perpetually remediate mistakes for which only he was to blame. He had long ago reconciled with the idea that only through death would he be loosed from this hellish continuum, but could he not wish for one more moment with you before his deathly liberation? Perhaps it was too much to ask.

He looked at the ceiling, the split in the wood. How much longer before it all collapsed?

**Author's Note:**

> hi, me again! i hope you enjoyed my stupid little piece. feedback and all that jazz is always appreciated. also, i swear to christ the next reiner piece i write will be so cleansing and happy and sappy and romantic… he needs a goddamn break.


End file.
